Anime Blu Ray Box Set Review : Full Metal Panic the first series

Full Metal Panic! is a novel series adapted in to 3 animes and several mangas. It is half military mecha anime with a certain sense of realism and half slice of life high school comedy with slightly romantic overtones. It is one of the first animes I watched when I started getting in to animu for realz.

The premise is that Sgt. Sosuke Sagara of the anti-terrorist group Mithril is sent to a high school in Japan to protect Kaname Chidori, a seemingly normal high school student. He has to protect her since she is a Whispered, a person who has data about secret technology programmed in to her subconciousness and kind of also ESP. This makes her a target of terrorists who want the data in her.
Sosuke has to fit in to high school, which is way more hard than it sounds like, since while he is a great soldier, he is also incredibly socially inept and behaves like Mr.Spock if he was a violent military otaku. Chidori herself doesn't help much, since most of the time she's annoyed by Sosuke's lack of understanding for people's feelings. At first she thinks he's just some military otaku who takes his obsession a bit too far. Chidori herself is a huge tsundere so this results in Sosuke being hit with a lot of objects.
Other characters include Tessa Testarossa, the 16 year old captain of Mithril's nuclear submarine (which might make her the most unplausable character in the series), Sosuke's teammates Kurz Weber and Melissa Mao, the no-nonsense manlyman Lt. Commander Kalinin and some other military members and classmates of Sosuke.

Yeah so it sounds kind of stupid and generic but the thing that sets it apart is that it's actually well written and executed. The characters have like actual depth to them

The series can be divided in to two kinds of episodes, comedy episodes and serious military mecha shooty bollocks drama episodes. I actually favor the comedy episodes. While the military action is decent, at times it is a bit too boring. The comedy episodes, on the other hand, are hysterical.

So about the serious drama episodes. These are the episodes where Sosuke is in a mecha and fighting terrorists. The mecha action is fine, in FMP they don't use particle rifles or any of that scifi shit, instead everything is done using contemporary firearms, just big enough to be used by mecha. Also giant knives. And it's actually a pretty realistic version of mecha combat, altough nowhere near as gritty and uber-realistic as VOTOMS. The mecha themselves aren't huge, in fact, they might be 2/3 the size of a Gundam.
A thing that spoils the realism for me, however, is the Black Technology and the Lambda Driver. This thing generates energy from your emotions to create sheilds or destructive bursts of energy, which makes it HAXXXX when all the other mecha are stuck using shotguns and knives.
But the really boring part of the drama episodes is the fact that it takes them so long for actual fighting to happen.

I do have to say I liked Gauron. Gauron is intimidating as fuck, once you see him grin you know that you are going to be fucked up hard. You really do get the feeling that he is insane, but not in like that ''oh you poor misguided soul''-way, more in that ''AWWWW SHIT PLEASE DON'T KILL ME DAWG'' way.

A lot of the humor in FMP stems from the fact that Sosuke has very little understanding of how average teenagers behave. This might sound stupid but it actually creates a lot of hilarious scenes. My favorite episode is where they try to teach Sosuke about dating and understanding women, that episode left me in stiches.

But jokes aside, Sosuke Sagara is basiclly the character that Heero Yuy tried to be. Sosuke is an emotionless badass who is amazing on the battle field, but has like actual flaws and depth, unlike Heero. While Heero's emotionless douchery was never really that intricite to the plot but was kind of there, Sosuke's lack of emotions play a significant role and in a way it's ironic that he has to pilot the Arbalest, a mecha that has the Lambda Driver, which is activated by emotions.

But really, think that the action episodes really outweight the comedy ones, which is a shame since the comedy episodes are gold while the mecha action is compitent but doesn't have a lot of omph to the fighting, since the Lambda Driver is used mostly just by Gauron who uses it to kill grunts with ease and everyone else just shoots with regular weapons.

The lowest point in the series for me was probably the arc with Sosuke and characters who are both introduced and killed in the same arc trying to assassinate Gauron in the middle east. There is no comical relief and besides Sosuke and Gauron there are no characters we actually care about and it takes them like 5 episodes to fight, only to have the fight end in 2 minutes.

Also Tomokazu Seki (countless roles, including Domon Kasshu, Beyond The Grave, Ichiro Miyata) does a great job as Sosuke Sagara, but when Sosuke starts to yell hotbloodedly he starts to sound like Domon Kasshu, which is cool as fuck. Satsuki Yukino (Yoruichi Shihoin, others) plays Chidori and has a somewhat memorable vocal performance compared to other japanese voice actresses which all blend together for me. Speaking of which, Yukana Nogami (C.C. from Code Geass) plays Tessa Testarossa in a fitting but not very memorable way, altought I might have prefered Yukari Fukui. Akio Othsuka (Solid Snake/Big Boss, Batou, Brian Hawk, Moomin's Papa (only one person will get the reference)) does a good job as Kalinin, but I feel that he didn't have a lot of interesting things to say. Shinichiro Miki (Takumi Fujiwara, Kisuke Urahara, Roy Mustang in FMA Brotherhood (but not the first)) is very fitting as Kurz Weber. Masahiko Tanaka (Ryo Mashiba) plays Gauron, and he fits well with the psychopathic nature of Gauron.

So do I reccomend FMP? Well if you like mecha anime you could do a lot worse, but the mecha part of the series takes up the most of the series while the humor is left in second place. If you just want to watch a funny slice of life then I'd suppose you should just buy Full Metal Panic Fumoffu, since that takes all the humor that was excluded from this series and just makes one big slice of life comedy out of it, which is actually the best Full Metal Panic series.

Oh also I'll probably not review The Second Raid since Funimation, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make the first series and Fumoffu region A and B, but not The Second Raid. So until there's a EU release of TSR I probably won't watch it.